Why — despite popular Christianity’s doctrinaire explanations — was a Galilean peasant child’s fate sealed even before he drew his first breath? Was the only reason for the birth of Mary and Joseph’s child simply so he …
read more(From a sermon I gave at Mt Hollywood Congregational Church on 12/2, the first Sunday of Advent.) On one seemingly ordinary day over 2000 years ago, a seemingly ordinary girl had an extraordinary rebirth. Mary abruptly experienced …
read more((My wife Roberta and I hope that THIS IS MY SONG will be sung at Obama’s 2nd inauguration in January. It’s “a song of peace for their land and for mine” – just the message America needs …
read more“Drawing from the personal experiences of a seasoned pastor, a team of modern liberal scholars, and the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, Teacher, Guide, Companion challenges readers to reexamine their own relationship with …
read moreBut the loss of their key center and probably the main leadership and overall strength of the movement opened the way for Pauline Christian influence which is clear particularly in Luke (both his Gospel and Acts).
read moreSoulful music that combines elements of folk, blues, jazz, and gospel. Lyrics are spiritual yet progressive, philosophical yet earthy, and realistic yet hopeful. The topics include: enjoying the sacredness of daily life, finding hope in difficult times, …
read more“I think that people who are leaving church, or people who call themselves spiritual but not religious, are raising really significant questions about faith, about community life and about the future of religion that religious leaders should pay more attention to,” says religion scholar Diana Butler Bass, author of Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. Watch more of our interview with her about the religious implications of the rise of the religiously unaffiliated.
read moreWhat’s a promise worth, any more? Surely one of the most peculiar phenomena in America’s peculiar politics has been Grover Nordquist’s no-tax-increase pledge. It was signed solemnly by countless Republican politicians over the last couple of decades. …
read moreThat bedrock of Jesus’ teaching did however have implications as to how we might order our lives in society; in closer alignment with what those scriptures depict as something more akin to what the divine had in mind. As well as how we ought to treat one another, without vacuous pretence or self-embellishment.
read moreThe great dividing line for two religions and the relationship between them is the period of 66-70 CE, which ended in the destruction of both Jerusalem and the great “Second Temple”. For Jews of the time this destroyed the political, economic and religious organization of Israel….
read moreChristianity follows the humble faith of an empty man. So how did we Christians become so full of ourselves? It’s time to empty ourselves of the belief that our religion is better than others.
read moreRichard Mourdock crashed his dogma into the wall of logic. He totaled his belief system with one elegantly absurd utterance. Now would be a good time for him to get a new religion, and a new political philosophy to go with it.
read moreSimone Weil was a Jewish philosopher from France who was hungry for God, and found God through Christianity – even though she never became a Christian…For her, being hungry for God was the way to have God. Yearning for God was her experience of God.
read moreI offer here a categorization and listing of ways that people think about God. I offer this list in order to stimulate my own thinking, and hopefully yours, about the tremendous variety of ways that people have tried to define or begin to comprehend Ultimate Reality.
read moreWhy would a Jewish American doctor risk serving the medical needs of Palestinian children in the occupied territories of the West Bank?
read more“So what do progressives do about the God thing?”
read moreMany Christians I know vote based on a single issue, usually abortion. Now I don’t want to get into the pro-choice, anti-abortion, debate. I understand that if the point of conception is the beginning of life, pro-choice does not feel like a viable option. But I believe that the question for a Christian-motivated voter is not as simple as a candidate’s stance on abortion. The question should be: How Christ-like is my candidate?
read moreFor Whitehead and Hartshorne, the indeterminacy of subatomic events suggests that freedom, and the creativity that flows from it, are ubiquitous in the universe. Even electrons make choices. According to process thought, we’re so free that even God can’t know the future, since all entities have the God-given ability to behave unpredictably.
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